Indeed, Belgium, Ireland the Netherlands and Taiwan are mentioned. I currently spend time in all of these countries for both professional and personal reasons. And maybe I should mention France here too, because I lived there for a year as well. 

Even while still at school, I had every intention of working internationally. I started my career at KLM and then ABN AMRO Bank and working for these organisations helped make my dream come true.

Since those early day of my career, I have worked in many countries  such as:

• Americas | Canada, Haiti, Jamaica, other Caribbean nations, Panama, Suriname, USA
• Australasia | China, Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Singapore
• MEA | Congo, DRC, Israel, Gabon, Sierra Leone
• Europe | Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK

I am counting my blessings. 

Over the years, I have been tapped for my expertise and featured in magazines, newspapers, on the radio and TV as well as on YouTube.

For instance the Netherlands Embassy in Ireland referred to me regularly whenever the Dutch press reached out to them for comments and information. 

Quite often I was asked to offer an Irish perspective to a Dutch audience and vice versa. For example, I was interviewed on Dutch radio about a massive matchmaking festival in Ireland. A wonderful topic of course. But on a more serious note interviews dealing with a range of economic issues took place as well.

Apart from sharing a more general perspective on business, social events and economic issues, my specific knowledge of the learning & development sector and the educators active therein seems to be much appreciated by the media.

Spending many motns of the year in Taiwan, I am making myself available to European press interested in developments in Taiwan and vice versa as well.

As the Country Manager of Dale Carnegie Training in the Benelux, I became a certified trainer in:

• Leadership
• Personal Effectiveness
• Presentation Skills
• Sales & Sales Management

Those skills coupled with many years of hands-on experience in acquiring, divesting, franchising, restructuring and starting businesses, provide me with a thorough grounding to speak on e.g:

• Business Development
• Intercultural Business
• Language Learning
• Learning & Development
• Mergers & Acquisitions
• People Engagement
• Restructuring
• Sales (Management)
• Success Drivers
• Etc.

Just thrown down a challenge and we'll see what can be done!

I am a great believer in serendipity: The occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. It's always good to meet new people. Almost without exception, there are things you can learn from each other and new ideas to be generated. 

So please, do not hesitate to book a meeting with me. Because let's face it, we have nothing much lose, yet potentially much to gain?

Whether you are a student, faculty, business professional, journalist, ... I very much look forward to getting to know you.

Three businesses/activities are mentioned and each has its own focus.

Finance4Learning

Finance4Learning is focussing squarely on organisations active in learning & development and has two main areas of expertise:

1. Finance-as-a-Service

   Enabling educators to increase sales by offering their students access bank loans, income share agreements, phased payment plans, scholarships, subscriptions and (FaaS) technology platforms
   
   

2. Hands-on Consulting
   

   E.g. business development, corporate restructuring, digital strategy & strategic cooperation 

NewLanguage Training

NewLanguage Training assists corporates, governments and SMEs with highly customised language learning programmes using a range of online and offline approaches.

We're fond of saying: If you want to buy anywhere in the world, you need to speak English. But if you want to sell anywhere in the world, it would be very helpful indeed to speak the local language.

Speaking

The audience for 'Speaking & Workshops' varies significantly. Examples include:

• Guest speaking at corporate events (regional meetings, kick-offs, ...)
• Pro bono events for e.g. members of a church and a network of people in-between-jobs
• Sessions for university students as well as a network of recent graduates of Asian descent
• Workshops for engineers working at e.g. ASML and Philips

We are very proud to be able to work closely with inter alia the following organisations:

• Banco Santander
• CEDEO
• Chargebee
• Crystal Clear Economics
• Marktlink
• Quotanda

Working with these and other organisations on a sometimes exclusive basis, enables my companies to offer truly state-of-the-art solutions when it comes to e.g:

• Finance-as-a-Service
• Hands-on Consulting
• Language Learning